The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Spencer Tillman Talks CFB Pay For Play & Upcoming Season Questions

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

is the Matt Thomas show. It is 101. The Matt Thomas show, our pleasure to have with us. One of my favorite people in the city of Houston. One of my favorite all-time special teams players for both the Niners and the Olders. Terrific broadcaster for the local NFL team.

But we love him for his work on Fox College football with Tim Brando, who we had on the show a couple weeks ago. We say hi to Spencer Tillman. Spencer, please tell me you're well. You're too kind, man. Thank you so much for that, Matt. How are you? I'm all right.

My partner's having a COVID test, so we're a little worried about him, but everybody else is doing just fine. Thank you for asking. Very good. Well, I hope everything turns out all right for him and everybody there, too. So prayers up for him. Yeah, amen on that. You obviously are watching a lot of the same stories we're seeing about the terrific number of tests that are being given out. But unfortunately, a lot of positive results littered throughout college campuses.

as you heard about Clemson, Kansas State, hear a little bit at Houston locally. What's going through your mind as you see these results? Well, I mean, it's not really surprised to me. I mean, one of the pleasures enjoys of being involved in leadership, whether it's on the field or off the field. One of my roles is as a board director at Houston Methodist Hospital. And, you know, we've got one of the top hospitals in the country,

and we've got data dashboard reports to come in from our president and CEO and leader and Mark Boom. And it is very comprehensive. and I see all of the detail that's in them, and it's not a surprise to me at all. And then when you juxtapose what you hear being trumpeted, and I'm not being political here, but either from the right or the left, you can understand why things are the way that they are because there's no consistent message one way or the other. And so people in that kind of rugged individualistic spirit that kind of defines who we are as Americans

to try to tempt fate, and they go out and engage in activities, whether it's the folks down in LSU at the bar that they were at, and those 30 positives came up. You know, all that stuff is predictable when you ignore the facts. But for me, I just look at it and say it's a shame if we missed an opportunity to really curtail our behavior, mask up, you know, social distancing, because we still can save the college football season and NFL season if we just do those two things alone.

Spence, I had Dennis Dot on from CBS Sports, one of the great college football writers a couple of days ago, and I had asked him, I said, were you as blown away as I was when Mark Emert, the president of the state of L.A. said, we're going to leave this up to each of the individual conferences. Were you surprised by that? Because if there's any time where we feel like we need a de facto commissioner for a state of college football, it's kind of be right now. That's a great take, Matt. And I tell you why it's important.

Tim Rendezzo's always talked about college sports needs a czar. And I think it does. I mean, the NFL has one unified voice. I mean, the commissioner, Roger Goodell, speaks for all 32 teams, right? So that can be a very significantly positive thing. a situation like this. When you're in a middle of a pandemic and you have ultimately on the college side, at the Division I level anyway, the top level, you've got 130 little archipelagos, little individual islands, and everybody has different budget sizes, and not everybody's going to be able

to spend the same amount of money on testing. And so how will that impact them, ultimately travel? All of those things that go into creating the perfect scenario for attacking something that you know very little about, it has varying degrees. every institution. Not everybody's going to have the same resources. So to have a unified voice and a way to come together would be a positive. And so college football definitely needs it, but it's needed it for years. And I don't think that part of is ever going to change. It's just the way the landscape is. You and Tim get to do a lot of great conference matchups, say in October, November, even sometimes in December or championship games. But that first month of the year,

I'll catch you guys doing a Ball State Michigan game or a Toledo versus Penn State, where obviously these other schools are taking paychecks. What is that going to be like for those schools if those games get canceled, Spence, especially if Penn State says, hey, I'd love for you Toledo to come, but I can't pay you what I want to pay you because I've got to fill 100,000 C stadium up first. And see, Matt, you're nailing really what is, to me, I think the underlying most significant issue in this whole discussion besides the loss of life, which is obviously Paramount, nothing comes close to that.

But when you start thinking about the fact that you have sport, again, in the position of mirroring what happens in the broader context of society or society doing that. That is, whatever happens in sport, whether it's Jackie Robinson being introduced to baseball by Branch Ricky in 48. You have maybe 18 years later, it took a while, but integration in terms of fullness came 18 years later with the civil rights bill. That changed. So when you have the capacity to create that kind of impact, that's the way. a wonderful thing. But you don't have that right now. You have these smaller schools who get big dollars. I'm talking $950, $1.1 million paydays from their interaction with these other big colleges. And if that's not going to take place, you're going to see the stratification of the classes get

even more distinct, right? So if you're a have-not, you're going to be more of a have-not. And to me, that mirrors what's happening in the broader context of society. And that's unfortunate. Spencer Timman with us from Fox Sports here on the Matt Thomas show at 106. Spence, this is also brought up a time where you're going to ask these young men. And again, I don't know where you are on the pay for play or pay for likenesses or do the car dealership endorsements. But this has struck a nerve with people that are saying, all right, you're going to send these kids out in potential harm's way and you're still not going to pay them. Does this ramp up that form of conversation as well? I think that's one of the reasons why Mark Emera doesn't want to be part of the discussion.

You know, they've lost six cases in a row dating all the way back to the Ed O'Bannon case, which started the Imogen likeness issue over the basketball game. So EA sports, I guess, was kind of the proprietor of all of that. But the bottom line is you're hitting on another very significant issue. It is going to cause some problems. And it's tied to the same issue that people are in the streets for and have been for the last 34 days or haven't long it's been since that May 25th scenario that happened in the streets of Minneapolis. It's tied to the same idea of inequality in the minds of many people that understand the bigger issue.

Because that's what it points to. Most people, if you're part of mainstream culture, you probably haven't connected those dots. It's like anything else. Until it squeezes you, until you feel it, you're not going to have much to say about it. But folks that are really doing deep dives in this see that this issue is not separate and apart from the broader issue of inequality. Because 68% the college level, 72% at the NFL level, are players of colors that occupy those positions on the field. So when you tell a large enough significant cohort that you can't earn money for whatever reason

because of whatever reason, then that is a form of constriction that should not be. And, you know, I had some very pointed comments while I was at CBS that shocked some people, but I still feel the same way. My attitude hasn't changed about it. It's more sophisticated in the way that it's approaching. I'm talking about the NCAA and its general approach with this whole issue of the restrictive policies that it has. It is nothing but a sophisticated form of slavery covered up with niceties of complexity. No, people are not trudging around in balls and chains. No, it's not. It's more significant.

That would not be tenable in a civilized society. But it is still a form of restricted capital. There is no other aspect of life in human life in America where people who are responsible for generating $1.3 billion per annum cannot participate in some way. I'm not an advocate of blind given a 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old money that's commiserable what they earn. Because it's only going to amplify that dysfunction. So, again, in a nutshell, it's a tough one for Mark Emeritt, and I'm not surprised that he doesn't want to be a part of that. And I didn't bring you on to talk about necessarily that, but it is a factor during all this time.

Let me ask you this question that we've had on this show multiple times. If Spencer Tillman is the superstar running back out of the University of Oklahoma, and he gets to do a car dealership or gets to do a pizza commercial or whatever, What about that offensive lineman that isn't known and doesn't have that kind of notoriety that Spencer Tillman does? How does that offensive lineman's supposed to feel? And if he's not getting the same type of offers that a star running back like yourself back in the day where it's able to get? That's what leadership comes in. And the best scenario in that situation, you say, hey, look, if you've got a player that's able to garner that kind of recognition,

where it merits in the minds of someone out there willing to pay it, a paycheck, What you need to do is a head coach's fashion a narrative, which sport already does, to say, you know what, you don't get those yards of this offensive line is not part of that. You have a sit down with that running back and say, you know what, you ought to do every Tuesday. You ought to have donuts ready for these guys. You ought to bring them. You ought to do this. Just detail exactly how that situation should be managed to whom much is given, much is required. That's an ethos that can be woven into the narrative.

So let's not ignore the fact of the role of leadership in those situations. There's ways to deal with that and it still stay consistent with what we are about in America as a whole. This is about rugged individualism. We are a capitalistic society. No, of those 37,000 kids that play in Division I football, not everybody's going to be able to garner the same amount of money. We know that. But you can foster an environment of your 125 or 30 athletes that you may have to create a balance or sense of ecology with respect to how you treat those players that are bringing in money. it becomes a team deal.

And I don't think you're going to get pushed back from any athlete in that scenario. I really don't. And that's up to the head coach to fashion that. All right. Back to the game at hand or hopefully the game at hand. If I gave you the chance to be the czar of college football, you and Brando split the job. Do you want to push everything back a little bit? How would you advise 120-something schools are going to play FBS football this year?

Well, what I would do is I'd say, look, the numbers are going to dictate everything. And right now we've got this current spike, and it's not a misrepresent. where it's coming from. There are a couple of dates that you point back to and you look at the metrics. You can see that there's a tangent, there's a line that kind of connects those two events, or there's actually three or four events. So there's a rhyme and reason to why it's speaking, peaking, and it has to come back to leadership. So if I'm looking at those numbers, and if I'm the czar, I'm saying, okay, we've got four weeks that we can play with on the back end of the season, because remember the regular season is going to end that week before December 7th, December 5th,

where the championship games are typically played. So you've got four weeks, essentially, until the championship, actually seven weeks until the championship game is played after that. So if you need to slide a couple of games because a couple of times you get peaking in terms of positives and maybe one team has X amount of players that come up, you can't feel a team, then you adjust it. So you've got four weeks to do that as a whole. So I think you've got time on the back end. I would try to get as many games as I possibly could to sort this thing out on the front end,

be mindful that you could get spikes if people start to be humans and start to ignore the facts and start to do like they've done in the last couple of weeks. So I think it can be done. I would not push anything back right now. I try to get as much as I possibly could on the front end, provided the numbers say that you're able to play and you've got a good system in place in a tenable situation to deal with what we're dealing with right now. I don't see any other reason to stop. I just don't. All right. Christobal last question. Is your gut say that we're going to have a disjointed season in terms of number of games that University of Washington somehow plays nine, Penn State plays 10, Arkansas

plays 8, I mean, what do you think? Using your rationale and everything stays in, and we have the normal amount of testing and results that come back positive. Could you see in your mind a disjointed uneven number of game season? And how the hell do you determine the college playoff off of that? Well, the only way that's going to happen is this. If you have a round-robin scenario, I think the Big 10 or the Big 12 is the only one that kind of has that technically around Robin where everybody plays,

you can have a legitimate champion and still be determined. But those games have to be missed within those first three or four weeks. Because once you get in the conference play, you're not going to have the ability for everyone to play everyone. And then therefore come out with a legitimate champion that can honestly, with a straight face, say that we are the champion. So that's going to be an issue. There's no question about it. I think the likelihood of us getting through the season 100% unaffected or losing at least one game is virtually zero. something is going to happen that's going to be an issue.

I just don't think we'll get all of them in, but I think we've got enough wiggle room on the back end to make it through and then get a season and get a champion crown. Great to hear your voice. I can't wait for you and Tim to be calling games. I don't know if you'll be doing it in the same room, same stadium, and the same city, but we look forward to getting you guys back on Fox very shortly. Friend, take care yourself.

Enjoy the rest of your summer and stay safe, okay? Matt, Matt, thanks a lot, buddy. You got it, Spencer Tillman, with us Fox Sports here on the Matt Thomas show.